NASA’s next flagship space telescope and Hubble successor is facing another significant launch delay and potential budget overruns after testing on the spacecraft fell behind schedule and a number of unforeseen problems

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft – on a quest to touch an asteroid – has set its sight on its destination in late February via the first detection of asteroid Ryugu by the craft’s Telescopic Optical Navigation Camera that will be used to guide it into close proximity to the distant world later this year.

ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter circling Mars since October 2016 this week finished a delicate aero-braking campaign of nearly one year that moved the spacecraft from a highly elliptical orbit into a nearly circular Low Mars Orbit in preparation for a final set of trimming maneuvers and the start of a highly anticipated science mission.

The stakes were high for SpaceX on Tuesday when their triple-core monster rocket leapt off from Florida’s Space Coast on an ambitious shakedown mission that held many unknowns for the California-based company.

SpaceX achieved a momentous feat on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 when successfully launching the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket on a high-stakes shakedown mission – successfully boosting into orbit and later off into Deep Space a midnight-cherry Tesla Roadster as a novelty-payload chosen for this flight by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

SpaceX’s triple-core monster rocket leapt off its LC-39A Launch Pad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center at 20:45:00.49 UTC on February 6, 2018, embarking on a long-awaited shakedown mission and in the process becoming the most powerful rocket currently in service.

A decade-long journey to the launch pad could end on Tuesday for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket with the long-awaited maiden launch of the tri-core rocket. With a commercial launch license from the FAA in hand, a clean Launch Readiness Review and fair weather forecast, SpaceX wheeled the monster rocket up the ramp to Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center Sunday night and placed it in its vertical launch position for liftoff on Tuesday during a two-and-a-half-hour window opening at 18:30 UTC, 1:30 p.m. local time.

SpaceX’s tri-core Falcon Heavy rocket breathed fire for the first time on Wednesday atop its Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad, igniting all 27 Merlin engines on the rocket’s business end for a 12-second test firing designed to collect valuable data not only on the behavior of the engines but also the rocket’s structure as a whole.

Over a year after its launch, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is inbound for a close flyby of Earth on Friday to use the planet’s gravity to bend the spacecraft’s trajectory and place it on a path approaching asteroid Bennu

Cassini – NASA’s flagship planetary exploration mission for the last 20 years – found a fiery grave in Saturn’s dense atmosphere on Friday, ending a remarkable mission of discovery that will keep scientists busy for years to come to decipher the secrets Saturn and its enigmatic moons hold.

SpaceX decided against the company’s previous plan of having their next generation Dragon spacecraft return to Earth via a powered landing to bring back cargo and crews from the International Space Station, company chief Elon Musk said on Wednesday at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington.